1. The Home of Advertising
In 1729 Benjamin Franklin published the Pennsylvania Gazette in Philadelphia with pages of "new advertisements." By 1784 The Pennsylvania Packet & Daily Advertiser, America's first successful daily newspaper, starts in Philadelphia.
Many publications banned advertising while others limited the space to one column width. However by 1870 there were over 5,000 newspapers in circulation which carried advertising and the demand for advertising services was rapidly growing.
2. Newspaper Advertising Agents
Early advertising agents were essentially resellers of newspaper space. The field had a shady reputation from the unscrupulous practice of buying large blocks of newspaper space at a discount and reselling tiny bits at highly inflated prices.
The strategy of early advertising was to convince the buyer of the quality of the product. A flattering illustration of the product, numerous descriptions extolling its virtues or testimonials from prominent citizens were commonly used. Later product claims gave way to elaborate stories of purchases that rewarded the buyer with success, popularity or romance.
Image from The Duke Library
From The Gilded Age, Joel Shrock
Greenwood Publishing 2004
3. Early Philadelphia Agencies
Volney Palmer opened the first advertising agency in Philadelphia in 1841 and is possibly the first person to use the term "advertising agency."
N. W. Ayers & Son. In 1869, 21 year old Francis Wayland Ayer opens a firm named after his father, N. W. Ayer. Despite rejecting alcoholic beverage and patent medicine accounts, the firm was so successful that by 1877 it acquired the remains of the original Volney Palmer agency and therefore laid claim to the claim "oldest advertising firm in the US."
N.W. Ayer & Son introduced the open contract, a practice which would alter the history of advertising forever. The open contract guaranteed clients the lowest possible rates the agency could negotiate with publications. Commission was later added and ranged from 8.5% to 15%. By 1909, the open contract became known as "O.C. + 15" by the agency, and the 15% commission later became an industry standard.
By 1884 the firm started to offer advertising but it was wasn't until 1892 that writers and artists worked together in creative teams. N. W. Ayer moved to New York City in 1973 and closed when acquired by the Publicis Groupe (based in Paris, France) in 2002.
4. The Science of Advertising
Psychologist and professor Walter Dill Scott introduced the study of psychology as an important element in advertising in his book The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice (1902). As part of his work he questioned consumers about their reactions to various advertisements — the beginning of market research.
In the advertising magazine, Printers Ink, he declared "The successful advertiser, either personally or through his advertising department, must carefully study psychology. He must understand how the human mind acts. He must know what repels and what attracts. He must know what will create an interest and what will fall flat. He must be a student of human nature and he must know the laws of the human mind."
Ernest Elmo Calkins's Business Triangle from The Art of Modern Advertising, 1905. Caukins made the link between advertising and the consumer, retailer and manufacturer."The mediums have been analyzed and classified; the goods manufactured, wrapped and named with a better idea of the purchaser's habits and needs, the consumers located and studied; their purchasing power tabulated; their shopping habits ascertained."
"American forged from her press a power which has made her shop keeping the most wonderful in the world. The shop and the newspaper joined forces and the result is modern advertising." ...Caukins
Caukins's diagram illustrated the necessity for successful modern manufacturers to utilize both an identifiable trademark and advertising to directly reach potential customers. The customers would then request the advertised products from their retailers and remove the intermediaries —jobber, wholesaler, etc who previously determined what products would be carried by the retailer.
Graphic Design History, 2001. An argument for acknowledging advertising as the root of graphic design.
5. Acknowledge Advertising
"Though graphic design as we know it today originated in the late 19th century as a tool for advertising, any association with marketing, advertising or capitalism deeply undermines the graphic designer's self image. Graphic Design History is an integral part of advertising history, yet in most accounts of graphic design's origins advertising is virtually denied, or hidden behind more benign words such as "publicity" or "promotion." This omission not only limits the discourse but misrepresents the facts. It is time for graphic design historians, and designers generally, to remove the elitist prejudices that had perpetuated a biased history." Heller, p.294
Heller points out that in 1922 William Addison Dwiggins first used the term "Graphic Designer" while describing his diverse practice of book, type and advertising design. Heller also notes that Jan Tschichold's books Die Neue Typographie (1928) and Typographische Gestaltung (1935) were intended to present "dynamic new possibilities for advertising compositions in archaic and cluttered printed environment—not some "idealistic notion of visual communication in an aesthetic vacuum."
Now review the poster section on this web site — each poster is really an advertisement.
For those of you who watch Mad Men you may recall Don Draper and his process of conceptualizing the "It's Toasted" campaign. The slogan was actually already in existence many decades before the imaginary 60's TV show as seen at the base of the Lucky Strike ad (left) aimed at women. Here we see the cigarette offered to women as an aid for weight loss. All part of the decades old campaign to reinforce the mandate that women must stay slender at all costs.
The American Art Director Comes from Europe
6. Art Direction
"The economic interdependence of magazines and advertising was reflected in the similar design of the editorial and advertising pages. Each had headlines, text columns and some kind of illustration. As journalism and advertising depended increasingly on images—the 'art' element—their reproduction and the layout as a whole became the responsibility of an 'art director.'
In America, art direction proceeded the profession of graphic design.
Americans looked to Europe for modern culture and sophistication." The influx of European art directors and artists would greatly influence graphic design.*
* From Richard Hollis, Graphic Design, A Concise History, Thames and Hudson, 2001, p 99.
7. American Graphic Design
American Graphic Design was finally born out of two new factors. As the twentieth century got underway, an explosion of new reproductive technologies stimulated specialization, separating conception and form-giving from the technical production activities of typesetting and printing. Simultaneously the United States received its first European modernist emigrés, the migration reached it height in he 1930's. These men understood design as a balanced process involving the powerful multiple modes of seeing and reading,and sends the possibility of theory and methods as guiding the creative process—the first rudimentarily seeds of professionalism. These designers, including Bayer, Sutnar, Burtin, Maholy-Nagy and Matter, brought with them Modernism's dual paths of ambiguity and objectivity. They shared an interest in ambiguity and the unconscious with new work in fine art, literature and psychology. Interpretive typography and asymmetrical compositions seemed more appropriate in a new world where tradition was rapidly disappearing.
On the other hand these European designers believed that rationalism and objectivity were appropriate for a new word ordered by commerce and industry They continued early Modernisms interest in abstraction and dynamic compositions. For the first time in the United States, they persuaded their clients to minimize copy into brief essential statements rather than the text-heavy literal descriptions favored in early American advertising.
From Katherine McCoy's American Graphic Design Expression, The Evolution of American Typography, Design Quarterly 149, MIT Press, 1999.
Brodovitch won the first prize in a poster competition for the Bal Banal. and he began to focus on graphic design.
8. Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha
American Vogue
Born to Turkish parents in the Ukraine in 1896, Agha left behind the Russian revolution to find work as a designer in Europe. He came to the US in 1929 after being recruited from German Vogue in Berlin by Condé Nast. Nast made Agha the art director for Condé Nast Publications."He [Agha] had a complete understanding of photographic techniques and and was aware of the avant-garde. He encouraged his designers to plunder the treasures of 'the temple of Constructivism.'"
Agha introduced the use of double page spreads ("rather than a sequence of single pages"), Constructivist compositions, bleeds, and the use of famous illustrators and photographers in advertising. (See right + above)
9. Cipe Pineles
(American)
As a young woman she worked under Dr. Agha at Vogue but later became "The first autonomous woman art director of a mass-market American publication (Seventeen.)" Pineles is credited with the innovation of using fine artists to illustrate mass-market publications. Important because it brought fine art and modern art to the attention of the young mainstream public, it also allowed fine artists access to the commercial world. Some young artists "discovered" by the magazine became well known: Richard Anuskiewicz and Seymour Chwast. An artist and illustrator herself, Pineles was the perfect art director: she left the artists alone. She asked them to read the whole story and choose what they wanted to illustrate. Her only direction was that the commissioned work be good enough to hang with their other work in a gallery... Read and see more about her on the AIGA web site.
10. Alexey Brodovitch
Philadelphia + Bazaar Magazine
He started out in the Russian military as an officer in the Czar's Imperial Hussars but by 1920 Brodovitch fled Russia for Paris. Untrained and unskilled as an artist he nevertheless found work as a set painter for the Ballet Russe, which brought him much closer to the spirit and thrust of contemporary artistic thought. Shortly thereafter he was expanded to fabric design and layouts for Arts et Métiers Graphiques magazine. Within a few short years, Brodovitch's talents were to develop rapidly in several directions, finding their application in everything from drawing to interior design to experimental graphic design.
In 1930 he was invited by the Philadelphia Museum of Art to create an advertising art department in its museum school.(Now University of the Arts.) Oddly enough, staid Philadelphia gave birth to the first of Brodovitch's revolutionary design laboratories, whose flame of inspiration was carried to other cities and was to illuminate new pathways of personal vision in the decades to come. Brodovitch resumed his role as an advertising designer for N. W. Ayer with Charles Coiner, the creative director.
In 1934, Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper's Bazaar, urged Brodovitch to become the art director of her magazine. Brodovitch remained with Harper's Bazaar for twenty-five years. The magazine's effect on editorial design, style, conception, taste and visual intellect continues to resonate throughout the broad compass of editorial design.
(Brodovitch segment condensed from the article," Brodovitch" on the Art Director's Club site)
Portfolio
(1950-1951)
Portfolio was a general arts and culture magazine published in Cincinnati by Zebra Press. Co-edited by Alexey Brodovitch and Frank Zachary and under the art direction of Brodovitch, Portfolio is often called the quintessential arts magazine as well as Brodovitch's best work. Portfolio contained the work of pioneering photographers, many of whom were students of Brodovitch and features many articles on influential artists and designers.
(design.rit.edu)
11. Herbert Bayer
Bringing the Bauhaus Ideals to the US*
Herbert Bayer came to New York in the 1938 to organize an exhibit about the Bauhaus for the Museum of Modern Art and stayed. Life in NEw York did not suit him and he felt that his life was not moving toward his Bauhaus ideal of a "complete human being." He moved to Aspen, Colorado to work with patron Walter P. Paepcke, (visionary owner of Container Corporation of America.) They organized various conferences and cultural festivals in Aspen to promote virtues of democratic values and love for nature.
Container Corporation wanted to be associated with high-quality design as well as social and environmental responsibility. The design program hosted avant-garde artists to build the Corporation's trademark. Their advertisements reflected social or artistic topics of their choice. As a result, the company was hailed as having "the most creative program in today's advertising," thanks to its use of Bauhaus designs.
Bayer saw working for Paepcke at a commercial company as a way in which an artist could most effectively engage society at large on important topics. One of his chief concerns was recycling and resource management. With this in mind he designed a series of eleven advertisements for the Container Corp-oration, nearly all of which focused on the importance of recycling. * This article is condensed from Peder Anker's fascinating piece: Herbert Bayer's Environmental Design documenting Bayer's global humanism and environmental design.
Millcreek Canyon Earth Work.
Americans : No Manifestos but Plenty of Wit and Enthusiasm
Born Peretz Rosenbaum in Brooklyn, New York in 1914, Paul Rand is considered one of the most influential designers in American History. His work combined the European Modernist aesthetic with American optimism and wit. Rand’s most widely known contribution to graphic design are his corporate identities but he did his share of print and advertising. I cannot do justice to his career as a designer and teacher in a short paragraph so I encourage you to visit the comprehensive site www.paul-rand.com.
"If you want to be as good as Rand, don't look at Rand; look at what Rand looks at" Danziger
13. Lester Beall
A self-taught designer, Beall was one of the first American's whose work was shown in the influential German magazine, Gebrauchsgraphik. Beall's body of silkscreen posters for the Rural Electrification Administration during the Depression projected a simple and clear theme of a new American frontier for energy and growth potential."
Beall proved to American business that the graphic designer was a profession that could creatively solve problems and at the same time deal with pragmatic issues of marketing and budget. (AIGA)
Bradbury Thompson's mark is impeccable taste applied with great elegance—an elegance of simplicity, wit, and vast learning—and an intimate knowledge of the process of printing, always with style, with informed taste. "How did he become "architect of prize winning books, consulting physician to magazines," pre-eminent typographer, designer of stamps, multiple medallist? It all started in Topeka, where he learned the printing business, from typesetting to binding. His career highlight were his 18 years with Westvaco 's Inspirations, art director for Mademoiselle and Art News Annual, and teaching at Yale's School of Art and Architecture. Excerpt from the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame
Also see his Alphabet 26
An AIGA Design Award Medallist, in Louis Danziger's early career he "stood on the shoulders of pioneer Modernists." His design exemplifies the diversity of Modernism and his teaching promotes the diversity of design. He has significantly affected many design genres—advertising, corporate work, books and catalog design, and exhibitions—and influenced the hundreds of students who attended his classes. He is one of the first Americans to study and teach the history of graphic design, "One thing that I have observed is that the students develop a greater commitment to their work which they now see as a part of a continuum. They see themselves as part of something, perhaps the next contributors to this history."
(Excerpt from this AIGA site)
The Creative Revolution on Madison Avenue (& in Chicago)
In his classic Public Opinion, journalist Walter Lippmann maintained that pictures are "the surest way of conveying an idea. A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master of the current situation. Hmmm. Joe the Plumber anyone?
16. Leo Burnett
Chicago
Leo Burnett could certainly be considered a master of symbols, his Marlboro Man, Pillsbury Doughboy and the Jolly Green Giant are all iconic symbols from his career that started in 1935. Burnett forged his reputation around the idea that "share of market" could only be built on "share of mind," the capacity to stimulate consumers' basic desires and beliefs.
Burnett was obsessed with finding visual triggers that could effectively circumvent consumers' critical thought. Though an advertising message might be rejected consciously, he maintained that it was accepted subliminally. Through the "thought force" of symbols, he said, "we absorb it through our pores, without knowing we do so. By osmosis."
To Burnett visuals appealed to the "basic emotions and primitive instincts" of consumers. Advertising does its best work, he argued in 1956, by impression, and he spent much of his career encouraging his staff to identify those symbols, those visual archetypes, that would leave consumers with a "brand picture engraved on their consciousness."
(This section is excerpted from the Time 100 People of the Century)
17. William Bernbach
New York
At the start of his career in the late 1930's Bill Bernbach partnered with modernist art director Paul Rand who greatly influenced Bernbach's ideas about ad layout. Later in his Volkswagen headline that urged the public to "Think Small," the Bernbach's concepts had a trademark simplicity that permeated both the copy and visual elements.
Bernbach worked at Grey Advertising. where he chaffed at the constraints of market testing and scientific analysis of advertising .In a now-famous 1947 letter to his bosses at Grey, he commented, "I'm worried...that we're going to worship techniques instead of substance. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art."
Bernbach eventually joined with partners to start Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency in 1948. The agency developed the 'concept approach' to advertising.
Bernbach eventually joined with partners to start Doyle Dane Bernbach advertising agency in 1948. The agency developed the 'concept approach' to advertising.
Bill Bernbach was the first to team up art directors with copywriters. The result was high-impact images twinned with memorable slogans. His agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, created the "Lemon" and "Think Small" ads for Volkswagen, "You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s real Jewish rye" and "We try harder" for Avis.
A link to the story behind the Cooper Black typeface
18. Gene Federico
New York
Pioneered the idea of visual puns in advertising by blending copy and image. Awarded the AIGA medal for stretching the boundaries of advertising design with typographic elegance and conceptual acuity. His wife worked as a designer for Paul Rand who suggested that Federico take a job at Grey Advertising. There he met Bill Bernbach and later joined him at Doyle Dane Bernbach. He was given the Woman’s Day magazine account for whom he created a series of ads memorable ads.
11.Otto Storch
New York
Otto Storch, a graduate of Pratt, also studied at NYU, the Art Students League and "the school of hard knocks." evening classes with Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper's Bazaar who taught a course at the New School. Brodovitch emphasized conceptual thinking and pictorial storytelling.
The class was comprised of art directors, illustrators, fashion artists, package, stage, and set designers, photographers, typographers, and me.
Brodovitch would dump photostats, type proofs, colored pieces of paper and someone's shoe lace if it became untied on a long table together with rubber cement. He would fold his arms and, with a sad expression, challenge us to do something brilliant."
Link to original on the Art Director's club site.
Otto Storch became an art director for whom idea,
copy, art and typography were inseparable.
Mary Wells Lawrence, Phyllis Robinson, and Shirley Polykoff, held their own in the famously male world of 1950s and 1960s Mad Ave.
Question, Why — decades after she founded Wells Rich Greene — aren't more women running major ad agencies? "This will probably get me in hot water, but maybe women are too smart," she says, without blinking. "Maybe women have quietly decided to let the men do all that. Women want more meaningful lives that are richer, with more feeling, more variety and more possibilities." This from the woman who ran one of Madison Avenue's hottest ad agencies for 23 years.
